Ken Frey: Breeding with Wild Species to Increase Heritable Variation for Oat Nutritional Value.

Since agriculture began moving north, millenia ago, oats have been important in sustainable cropping systems. In relatively cool rain-fed regions, including the U.S. central Midwest, oats took the place of wheat and barley. Then, in an astonishingly short space of time (about 1930 to 1950) , tractors replaced draft horses. The market for oats shrank abruptly, to the point where fewer farmers could afford to grow them. For oats to remain part of a robust rotation, a new source of commercial value was needed. At the time, private sector plant breeding was moving full speed ahead with crops that could bring economic returns to breeding, such as corn and later soybeans. Any exploration for new value for oats -- especially given the uncertain outcome-- would have to be a public sector role. Iowa State University hired one of George Sprague's graduate students for the job, Ken Frey. Frey looked at oats from a unique perspective, quite possibly the result of his corn breeding education . One might say that instead of breeding for hybrids, he hybridized different approaches to plant breeding . When he found little variation in cultivated oats for traits to add value, he searched in related wild species. In wild oats he found --not major single genes, but rather, a wide range of quantitative variation-- in the form of many genes of small effect for traits that could be used to increase the nutritional value of oats for humans. He created inter-specific hybrid breeding populations of oats with high-protein content and others with high levels of nutritious grain oil content having desirable balance of essential fatty acids, as well as oats with high beta-glucan levels; and used short-cycle recurrent selection to recover elite cultivated types. In the process, he educated over a hundred graduate students. Frey's impact today is also with us today through the National Plant Breeding Study of the 1990's. The Study was made possible by his many students and had a strong impetus on our current national public dialogue about the importance of plant breeding to agriculuture in the U.S. and globally.